Reading between the lines of failure logs: Understanding how HPC systems fail

Abstract

As the component count in supercomputing installations continues to increase, system reliability is becoming one of the major issues in designing HPC systems. These issues will become more challenging in future Exascale systems, which are predicted to include millions of CPU cores. Even with relatively reliable individual components, the sheer number of components will increase failure rates to unprecedented levels. Efficiently running those systems will require a good understanding of how different factors impact system reliability. In this paper we use a decade worth of field data made available by Los Alamos National Lab to study the impact of a diverse set of factors on the reliability of HPC systems. We provide insights into the nature of correlations between failures, and investigate the impact of factors, such as the power quality, temperature, fan and chiller reliability, system usage and utilization, and external factors, such as cosmic radiation, on system reliability.